History Rhyming
by dog.spartacus
Summary: Tag for 16x13, "Decaying Morality." Similarities between two events lead Olivia to reevaluate her past.


References and spoilers: "Smoked" and "Decaying Morality" (and, to lesser degrees, "Inconceivable," "Rescue," and "Savior")

Disclaimer: these characters are _so_ not mine.

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"History Rhyming"

She had moved past it. She was over it, over his distance, over his absence. He was gone, and that was fine. Life moves ever forward, doesn't it? In time, you stop being disappointed that there's no hot tea waiting for you on your desk in the mornings. You learn not to search for a certain face or listen for a certain voice in the bullpen. You train your fingers to dial someone else's number when it's three a.m. and you can't sleep again. And life moves forward.

This is what she'd told herself.

And history doesn't repeat itself, but on a brisk night in January, it suddenly rhymed for Olivia Benson.

It wasn't until the case was closed, the girl's uncle arraigned and Barba's deal with the father in place, that Olivia finally allowed herself to acknowledge what was happening: another sixteen-year-old Jenna had entered her life.

Davis, of course, was different from Fox. In both of their stories was vigilante justice, but Olivia knew that she would never spend long, sleepless nights obsessing over whether Davis was a victim or a perp. She would never grapple with convincing herself that Davis's story ended exactly as it had to. She would never blame this new Jenna for ruining her life the way the first had.

...maybe she hadn't moved past it after all.

One night, about a week after the case wrapped and the dust had begun to settle, late in the evening, after Noah had been down an hour, Olivia called him. No vague or ignorable texts, no pretext of a holiday or a birthday or some other milestone: just a straight phone call, one person needing to speak to another. Because, it seemed, she _wasn't_ over it. She _wasn't_ over his distance, his absence, his... betrayal. Honestly, she wasn't over _him_.

It had been four years since he took his early retirement, two years since they'd last spoken, a couple of months since she last reached out. He hadn't been responding to any of her texts, and she couldn't even be sure he'd gotten them. Maybe he didn't want anything to do with her. Maybe he had changed his number. Maybe he'd lost hers.

She sat on her sofa with a glass of red wine, her phone held lightly to her ear, not fully committed—ready to hang up in case of a wrong number. As the line rang, she sniffed and glanced at the clock. At least, if a stranger answered, it wasn't too inappropriately late.

Finally, the ringing stopped. "Yeah," came his voice on the other end. Short, clipped, no-nonsense. Just the way he'd always answered. Ever the cop.

"Hey it's me," she breathed, trying to sound confident. She briefly wondered whether he recognized the number, whether he had picked up not knowing who it was. Whether he would recognize "me" anymore.

He cleared his throat. "Kinda late, Liv," he said. He sounded tired, annoyed.

She glanced at the clock again, thought about apologizing and hanging up. "Am I... interrupting something?" she asked instead.

She heard him take a deep breath. "No, what's up?"

Her mind spun. Of course, she should have expected this question—but she was surprised when he answered the phone, and now she was ill-prepared for the conversation. "Um... nothing. I just... you know," she stammered. "I—"

"Is something wrong?" he rushed, his voice suddenly clearer and more alert.

"No," she was quick to assure him. "I just... I wanted to hear your voice."

There was a long, uneasy silence, and she knew why. They didn't say those kinds of things to each other, even when they were partners, even when the other's mere presence was regularly enough to calm one of them down. Its truth didn't mean it was _said_. "You're sure... everything's okay?" he asked at last, apparently dubious.

"Yeah, I'm fine," she said with a smile, hoping that it would transform her tone into something he would believe.

He fell silent, but she could hear him breathing.

"Please say something," she urged, but it came out as a whisper. Tears were welling in her eyes, despite the brave smile she still had plastered on her face.

"I want to see you—"

"Elliot—"

"I don't want to do this over the phone. Please. Can I meet you somewhere?" His own desperation in that moment surprised her; it seemed to outweigh even hers.

She regretted having to turn him down, but she had to think about Noah. "No," she told him.

"Olivia!" he begged.

"I can't—I can't leave the house—"

"Then I'll come to you—where are you?"

"Elliot—"

"Liv, I've been trying to give you space, but you call me at eleven o'clock at night when we haven't talked in two years and you want me to just... pretend it's normal? That everything is fine?"

As the first of her tears began to fall, she tried to breathe it away, but it didn't work. She sniffed and hoped he couldn't hear it through the phone.

"It's _not_ fine," he continued emphatically.

She took a shaky breath. "You never responded to any of my texts."

"I was standing down—I thought that's what you wanted."

"If that's what I wanted, why would I keep texting you?"

He took his own fortifying breath. "I was holding you back, Liv. You couldn't move forward if you were dragging me with you. We both knew that."

"Yeah? Then why did you answer tonight?"

"I thought something was wrong."

She took another breath. "Something _is_ wrong," she confessed.

"Tell me," he said sternly. She could just imagine him gearing up for a fight.

She straightened on the sofa, debated whether to say it. The other Jenna flickered in her memory, and she thought about the slippery edge of innocence. Olivia hated what happened four years earlier. "I miss you," she told him simply.

He huffed loudly. "Tell me where you are—_please_," he pleaded. "I can't do this anymore—I've gotta see you."

Four years of bottled emotion erupted in her urgent response: "I want to see you, too."

"I'm on my way," he said confidently. She chuckled breathlessly, immensely relieved for reasons she couldn't explain and didn't want to try to understand. Even as she gave him her new address, she heard rustling on the other end. He was putting on his coat, no doubt, and then she heard a door shut and his muffled panting before they ended the call. If nothing else was the same, at least Elliot Stabler was still a man of his word.

Olivia finished her wine and rinsed the glass then checked on Noah in his room. She watched him sleep for a few minutes, studying the way his little form pulsed slowly with each breath in and out. Watching him, she couldn't help but think of Calvin, and of Gladys Dalton's little girl, and of all the countless children she had been denied by Social Services and adoption agencies because she wasn't "prime parent material." She sighed, and her mind drifted again to the Jennas. She hated what happened, but would she really be where she was right now if not for Jenna Fox? She didn't like to think that way, but it might have been healthier than listing all the things the incident had taken from her. Would she have reunited with Brian? Would she be living in this apartment? Would she have made sergeant so soon? Would she have Noah?

Would Elliot be on his way over?

Maybe the occasional reminder, an echo of the past, wasn't such a bad thing.

With a deep breath, Olivia rolled away from Noah's doorframe and lumbered back to her bedroom to change clothes before Elliot arrived. Having done so, she then slipped into her bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. The water was cool and clean, and she reveled in the very basic sensation of her own skin beneath her palms. She scrubbed life back into her tired face and gazed at herself in the mirror while the faucet continued to run. Four years felt like an eternity, sometimes.

The buzzer sounded. She snapped out of her trance, shut off the water, passed a towel over her face, and headed for the door.

_-fin-_


End file.
